Category Archives: Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service that most businesses use it as a way for advertising. Know about latest news about Facebook.

What is Facebook history?

What is Facebook history?

Facebook, Information, social media

Not all the story begins with the name of Facebook only! It is true that Facebook was founded in 2004 at Harvard dorm room, but still, there is a lot of stories, inspiration, efforts, and talent behind this name. if you want to know how Facebook was started, you need to back to Mark Zuckerburg’s childhood.

when was Facebook started?

From an early age, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, and CEO of Facebook had a keen interest in computer programming. His parents were working at a dental clinic. At age 12, he could facilitate his father’s dental office with his own written program called Zucknet using Atari BASIC. A program to send and receive a message from the receptionist to doctor, with the idea of connecting these two without walking around. Young and genius, as a school student Zuckerburg started writing all other amazing codes to connect people at a different place, even to connect their family at home. Zuckerburg’s father says that Mark grew up with no specific nurturing, and it seems Zuckerburg had the freedom to develop his idea. He was popular at school for his programming skills. Once he was so young, he had some offers from Microsoft and Google to sell his program, but he refused to sell it. It seems that he had the mission to bringing the world closer together even when he was a child. But most of the story of Facebook began with Facemash, a program which could recognize the college students’ face to rank their attractiveness. However, Facemash soon were shut down because of hacking the university system into finding students’ pictures. Though, Mark Zuckerberg did not stop thinking and creating!

Facebook was founded

It was February, 4th, 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg along with three others: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes gathered at the Harvard dorm room, and they together could establish Mark’s idea of coding “theFacebook.com” and expand it to connect college students at Harvard. As he said in his interview with CNBC, thefacebook.com was for the Harvard students only to share their information, hobbies, their favorite movies, books and most important to see who their friends are! And in general, it was about finding interesting information about people. This connection was not limited to the Harvard but soon at other universities including Yale, Colombia, and MIT. thefacebook.com extended from college and colleagues to high school and connected millions of people within a year. In 2004, an amazing part of thefacebook.com started which was giving the public a wall to write and share their thoughts. A year later, after dropping “the” from thefacebook.com in 2005, and some changes in its features such as launching Facebook photos it could reach around six million users in that year only. For the very first time, through the facebook people could find their lost friends from all around the world! And It was all other attractive features, such as mobile app launches, adding work network, Facebook API, News Feed and Mini-Feed, the marketplace, video lunches which all made around 60 million users for Facebook. However, a change on Facebook was its “Like” bottom which soon becomes very popular, and it leads reaching 500 million active users on Facebook just from 2009 to 2010, which made him the man of the year on Times magazine. Six months after launching Facebook camera in May 2012 it hit the one billion users and become the world first social media. It also could be interesting for people and maybe from the business side to know why Facebook logo color is blue. As Mark Zuckerberg told the New Yorker magazine, he is red-green colorblind and the color he can see the best is blue. He explains that the blue is the richest color for him. 

Facebook buys Instagram, WhatsApp, Atlas, and Oculus

Now the company is rich and worthy with offices in different states of America. In 2012, after three days of talk at Zuckerberg’s house to agree upon selling Instagram which mostly used for sharing pictures, the meeting was ended up at the price of $16billion. Facebook bought Instagram to show its connectivity using another powerful program. Instagram was founded by Mike Krieger and Systrom who was the first person to share a photo on Instagram. The very first picture uploaded on Instagram was the photo of a dog was sitting close to a taco stand in Mexico with the caption of “test” in 2010.  Like Facebook, attractive features such as live video, photo filtering, direct message, business profile soon made Instagram a favorite app in which people were keen to share their stories and pictures. With connecting these two, Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerburg’s dream of bringing people closer together become more real. There was more about Instagram, a popular personal or business application. Hashtag was another favorable feature on Instagram that made people able to send their voice to all over the world. Hashtag gave the power to the philanthropists, environmentalists, actors, musicians, and all other famous figures to achieve their goals. Of course, with the help of Donate option on Instagram, thousands of people all over the globe could take benefits of that. He did not stop expanding his company. A few years later, Facebook bought WhatsApp too, and other big names such as Atlas, Oculus and it made it one the most precious company in the world.

Now, Facebook worth $200 billion with 40 million active small business on it but there has been a debate on the future of this 15 years old social media, would it be a vibrant and attractive media even decades later? Or it would be replaced by other powerful social media coming soon?

Facebook Sues Chinese Companies for Selling Fake Accounts

Facebook, Press, social media

Facebook and Instagram removed 2.1b inauthentic accounts from January 2018 to September. Facebook and Instagram sued four Chinese companies for promoting the trade of fake accounts, likes, and followers that the social network titan says can be used for destructive purposes.

The Chinese companies promoted and produced the fake accounts over the last two years and sold them on six websites, marketing them in mass quantities, according to a criticism listed Friday in San Francisco federal court.

“Fake and inauthentic accounts can be used for spam and phishing campaigns, misinformation campaigns, marketing scams, advertising fraud, and other fraud schemes which are profitable at scale,” Facebook and Instagram claimed. They declared fake accounts were also built on Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Facebook has come under close investigation over the use of private information and the impression of objectionable content on its 2.7 billion monthly users, with authorities around the world doubting the company’s policies. Friday’s lawsuit, which declares multiple violations of US trademark equity, is one way the company is struggling back against economic exploitation of its social networks.

By using artificial intelligence to detect fake accounts, Instagram and Facebook disabled 2.1 billion inauthentic accounts from January 2018 within September, “often within minutes of the accounts’ creation,” according to the complaint.

The companies named as offenders — 9 Xiu Shenzhen, 9 Xiu Feishu, 9 Xiufei, and Home Network — are based in Longyan and Shenzhen. They are affiliated companies of electronics and hardware, as well as providers of software and online promotion services, according to the complaint.

The defendants couldn’t quickly be located for comment.

Facebook is querying a court order enduringly barring the Chinese companies’ alleged policy and financial damages.

Facebook just Removed a new Wave of Suspicious Activity Linked to Iran

Facebook, Press, social media

Facebook just declared its latest round of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 356 accounts, 262 Pages, 162 Instagram accounts and three Facebook groups, that showed “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that recognize it as a potentially state-sponsored or otherwise coordinated and deceptive activity.

As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy transcribed in a press call, Facebook coordinated nearly with Twitter to find these accounts, and by co-operating early and often, the company was able to use that to create our investigation.” Today, Twitter published a postmortem on its efforts to fight misinformation during the U.S. midterm election last year.

As the Newsroom post details, the movement affected a broad swath of regions around the globe:

“There were multiple sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, US, and Yemen. The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events… on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.”

The Iranian activity wasn’t focused on conceiving real-world events, as we have seen in other cases. In many examples, the content “repurposed” reporting from Iranian spread ideas that could benefit Iran’s positions on different geopolitical matters. However, Facebook refused to link the newly recognized activity to Iran’s government directly.

“Whenever we make an announcement like this we’re really careful,” Gleicher said. “We’re not in a position to directly assert who the actor is in this case; we’re asserting what we can prove.”

How to Change your Page’s Category on Facebook?

Facebook, Information, social media,

Years ago, the page category of Facebook was chosen when you created it. You’d have to decide whether you wanted a page dedicated to local services, books, and magazines, to sports, or whatever. Once you picked a category, you would get locked in, or at least almost locked in; there was some compliance within your general category, but if you needed to change the overarching super-category, you had to jump through a bunch of hoops.

These days, setting a category for your Facebook page is much more flexible. You are not limited to one type, either; since Facebook lets you fit multiple categories into your page, you can choose up to three. For instance, a local newspaper could choose a magazine category, a local services category, and a website category, and all of them would be legitimate.

Facebook page categories

Facebook has turned the page category box into a pretty free-form and open selection. There are a lot of different categories to choose; so many I cannot possibly list them here. Every keyword seems to have a dozen various categories attached to it. For instance, if I type in these keywords, here are suggestions Facebook gives:

  • Local: Farmer’s Market, Government Building, Government Official, Local Travel.
  • Boat: Boat Rental, Boat Tours, Boat Service, Marina, Sailing Instructor, Boat Dealership.
  • Music: Artist, Song, Music Award, Music Video, Music Venue, Music store, Musician/band, Arts and Entertainment.

The list goes on and on and on. Facebook also lets you put in three different but specific categories. As they claim, they only hold the three most particular categories. So, for instance, if you added “music” and “song,” it’s possible that they would only keep “song.”

This means it’s important to dig down to three relevant and specific categories to fit your brand. A general contractor for different home repairs might plug in electrician, plumber, and carpenter, though this might leave out some of their essential services. Alternatively, they could put in house renovation, overall contractor, and landscaper.

It’s a good idea to think about three different phases of your Brand and find categories that include as many of the fields as possible to get a general overview of your page type. Remember, though, that different categories can implement various features.

The features of Page Categories on Facebook

Facebook’s limitations on what pages can do is a little of an old system, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they remove or revamp it in the next year or two. I’ll sum up how it works now, but don’t be worried if it changes; just let me know in the comments and I will look over what they have changed. For now, you can use their table as a reference here.

Right now, ten features of a page are “variable” depending on your page category. But actually, only 4 of them are changeable. According to Facebook, every page has:

  • The ability to compose a short description of the Brand or entity that it represents.
  • The ability to link to a particular website for the Brand or entity the page represents.
  • The ability to list special services that the brand or entity provides.
  • The ability to turn on review system and ratings (previously attached to being a local business) so that fans and followers can review and give star ratings to the brand or entity.
  • The ability to add an email for people that use it as a method of contacting representatives of the brand or entity.
  • The ability to enter a phone number, again for people to use to contact the brand or entity the page represents.

Also, some categories have access to extra features, such as:

  • The ability to include an address is only available to Facebook pages in categories that intimate a related business address, such as brands and organizations, companies, people or sports entities, and local services.
  • The ability to display a location map with a mapping system powered by Facebook, beneficial for people to locate a company branch near their location; available to the same categories as above.
  • The ability to list particular business hours of operation, where hours of service can mean the distinction between a customer making a drive or being disappointed when they arrive.

There is some adaptability in what is and isn’t allowed, and I think that Facebook defaults to “allowed” whenever possible. For instance, a page that represents a book would not be allowed to include business hours, but if they are also registered as a local service, they should be allowed.

How to change your page category on Facebook?

While creating a new page, or editing your existing page, you can choose or change your categories at any time. To edit your page’s category, you should follow these steps:

  • Click “about” on the left side of your Facebook page.
  • Click “Edit” right next to the “Category.”
  • Enter up to 3 categories and choose what you want from the dropdown list that appears.
  • Click “Save.” And voila!

You can change your page’s category as many times as you like, there are no limitations for that. If you can’t find a category that describes your Page, try to choose the closest available option.

If you have any other questions about Facebook categories, you know you can always ask us in the comments below.

How to Check your Hidden Messages on Facebook?

Facebook, Information, social media

Facebook is just like an onion. You can use its features at face value, but if you dig a little deeper, you will find things typically hidden in your day-to-day interactions on the platform, such as Messages. “I use Facebook Messenger and check my inbox constantly,” you may say. Still, you may not know that you have some hidden messages on the Facebook messenger waiting for you to read.

Usually, when you check your Facebook Messages, you are only seeing chats from your friends. That isn’t actually all of your them. Facebook filters messages from people you aren’t friends with on the platform. Typically, this is helpful—many of those messages are just spams. However, every once in a while, a specific message from a not-yet-Facebook-friend ends up in that no man’s land.

How to find hidden messages on Facebook?

You can follow these steps to check your hidden messages:

  • Open Facebook on the desktop.
  • Tap on the message icon at the top right of your screen.
  • In the menu that pops up below, you can see that “message requests” is grayed out next to “recent.”
  • Click on message requests. Here are the messages from users who want to chat with you, but aren’t yet your friend on Facebook.
  • You can also click “See filtered requests” at the bottom of the menu for more missed messages.

You can also receive these messages from the Facebook messenger:

  • in the app, go to your settings, then tap “people.”
  • tap “message Requests” then “Filtered Requests.”
  • This will show you all the messages Facebook considered unworthy of your time.

Once you find out about this secret inbox, it’s a good idea to check it every once in a while, just to make sure you didn’t miss anything important.

What do you think about this hidden inbox? Are you curious who have messaged you? Go ahead and check your hidden messages on Facebook.

Everything about the “Zucker-Bugs”

Facebook, Fix the problem, social media

Almost everyone uses Facebook, but can we all agree that sometimes it kind of sucks? For every great picture or story you see on Facebook, you will see tons of low-quality memes, disturbing content, and even frustrating user interface elements. Let’s put a stop to all these for good. We will cover fixes for some of Facebook’s most common issues so you won’t have to put up with them anymore.

1- How to shut up excessive posters?

We all know someone like this:

  • Your friend posts too many potential rants.
  • Your grandma has no idea how to use Facebook and posts nonsense all the time.
  • That one friend who posts too many photos of their pet.
  • A colleague who
  • copies and pastes a post filled with grammatical errors to let you know they still hate cancer!

These situations result in a dilemma. You don’t like to unfriend these people on Facebook and hurt their feelings, but you are also sick of their posts. The solution here is to unfollow them; you will not see their post updates anymore, but you remain friends.

How to unfollow someone on Facebook?

You can unfollow the annoying friends by these simple steps:

  • Go to their profile page
  • Click on the following box on the right side of their cover picture
  • Select Unfollow [Username].

Now you will not have to suffer from their posts. You will still be friends though, so you can check their timeline anytime you want to find out what they’re up to. They won’t receive a notification of you unfollowing them, so don’t worry, you’re safe! Enjoy your clutter-free timeline.

2- Create an important friends list

On the other hand, there are a few friends whose posts we don’t want to miss. Facebook is changing its algorithm all the time, so you might not even see some of the updates from your friends. To prevent this, you can specify your closest friends and get their updates at the top of your feed, every time.

How to specify a friend on Facebook?

To do this, you have to follow these steps:

  • Go to your friend’s page whose posts you don’t want to miss
  • Click the following box again
  • Select “See First” from the options

Now Facebook will always show you their updates right away. Whether you use this for Facebook stalking or not is up to you!

If you really cannot miss an update from a special someone, you can get notifications when they post something new. To do this:

  • Go to your friend’s page
  • Click the “friends” box
  • Choose “get notifications” from the options on the list.

Now Facebook will send you a notification every time they post something on the platform.

3- Get rid of the targeted ads

Facebook makes a lot of money from advertising. Therefore, it spends a lot of time trying to show you the most relevant ads hoping you will interact with them. By default, Facebook just tracks you everywhere you go on the platform and uses your browsing habits to select the best ads for you. You can get rid of these personalized ads and see only general ones for your age group and gender.

How to disable personalized ads?

To opt out of these ads you should:

  • Click on the small drop-down arrow at the top right of Facebook’s window
  • Select “settings.”
  • Select “ads” on the left sidebar
  • Open the ad settings category on the resulting page
  • Now you can change the first two options to “No” and the third option to “No one.”

This will stop Facebook from using your browsing history to show you targeted ads.

4- Stop sharing posts with everyone

Just like you get sick of seeing people’ posts, sometimes you don’t want to share your updates with all of your friends. Maybe you don’t want your boss to see what you were up to on your day off, or don’t need another load of your mother’s commentary on what you have to share. By using these few methods, you can simply hide your posts from certain people.

If you want to hide a post from someone once:

  • click on the audience selector button (the one that says Friends or Public) on your post.
  • Select Friends except (username) and search for the one you don’t like to see your post.
  •  Click on the red Remove button to keep them from seeing your post
  • Save Changes to finish.

To prevent someone from seeing all of your posts, you can add them to your Restricted list. Users on this list won’t be able to see anything you post unless it’s set to Public or you tag them in it. To add someone to your restricted list:

  • Go to their Facebook page
  • select the Friends button,
  • click Add to another list
  • Scroll down and click the Restricted list.

5- Block annoying app invites

Facebook features lots of stupid games, all of them designed to waste your time and money. If you’re sick of friends asking for some extra lives in Candy Crush, you can block all Facebook invites and requests by a person or by game. To do this:

  • Go to your settings
  • Select the blocking tab this time
  • Find the block app invites field and enter your annoying inviter’s name

This way you will automatically block all their future requests, and don’t worry this doesn’t affect any part of your interaction with them on the platform.

You can also enter the app’s name in the “block apps” field to prevent it from contacting you.

6- Common Facebook errors

We conclude with tips for a few common errors people get while trying to access Facebook.

Forgot Facebook password

Forgetting your Facebook login information is one of the most common issues people run into. You should try to recover your Facebook account if you can’t log in, but first, make sure your account isn’t hacked, or else you need to report the problem to Facebook.

To recover your Facebook account:

  • Go to the Facebook recovery page
  • Write down the email address or phone number you have added to your Facebook account.
  • Once you managed to identify your account, click continue
  • Facebook will send you a security code via email or SMS.
  • Enter the code, and you will have your account recovered.

Can’t connect to Facebook

Since Facebook in one of the biggest platforms on the web, it rarely faces an outage. If you can’t get on Facebook, follow these steps to diagnose the issue:

  • Check a website like down detector to see if Facebook is really down. If it is, you can’t do much more than waiting.
  • Visit another website to make sure of your internet connection. If your internet connection is down, you can restart your phone, wifi, or cellular to fix it.
  • Clear the cache and cookies of your browser
  • Try to open Facebook in an incognito window or another browser, and if it works, something is wrong with your current browser.
  • Disable your VPN or any other tracker-blocking extensions you are using and try to connect to Facebook directly.
  • Reboot your device and router.

That’s it.

Which Facebook annoyances drive you crazy?

Do you have any other issues with the platform? Leave a comment and let us know about it.

Best Holiday Facebook Contest ideas you Should Run this Christmas!

Facebook, Fun, Information, social media

There’s still time to run an excellent holiday Facebook contest! If you need some last-minute holiday-contest inspiration for your Facebook, you can find it here. And if you want some motivation for pulling such a contest together, then you should know:

64% of Facebook users state they are likely to share a link to a holiday contest or giveaway.

Remember to offer a prize related to your brand. If you give away something valuable that isn’t aligned with your brand, you run the risk of reaching a bunch of people who follow and engage with you only because they want to win that expensive prize. Here are some joyful Facebook contest ideas that you can get up in minutes, whether you create campaigns or run simple Timeline promotions.

Facebook Holiday photo contests

It isn’t hard to get your followers to upload pictures; a typical Facebook user uploads an average of 2017 picture each, every year.

  • Cutest couple picture contest

Theme: the ugliest holiday sweater, best Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus or elf couple.

  • Christmas decorating photo contest

Theme: nature, handicrafts, ornaments, animal, patriotic, retro, etc.

  • Family holiday photo contest

Theme: most creative or awkward family holiday photos.

Facebook content contests

An essay contest is just a contest that involves text rather than photo or video. You can let your Facebook community vote for their favorite topic.

  • Holiday recipe contest

Ask your audience about their favorite holiday recipe.

  • Holiday storytelling contest

Have your Facebook followers share a brief description of their favorite holiday tradition.

  • Dear Santa letter contest

Ask your audience to write letters to Santa about why they should win in your competition.

Status updates for timeline promotions

  1. “All I want for Christmas is … “, Write the name of the gifts you want to get this Christmas, and you’re entered to win. The winner will be chosen randomly.
  2.  “The movie or song that best describes the holidays for me is…” Post the title of your favorite holiday song or movie title here, and you’re entered to win. The winner will be chosen randomly.
  3.  “I found out the truth about Santa…” Tell us your story here, and you’re entered to win. The winner will be chosen randomly.
  4. “The most memorable holiday food I’ve ever had was when…” Tell us your story here, and you’re entered to win. The winner will be chosen randomly.
  5.  “The one New Year’s resolution that I kept was ….” Let us know the resolution, and you’re entered to win. The winner is chosen at random.
  6.  “My 2015 New Year’s resolution is ….” Let us know the resolution, and you’re entered to win. The winner will be chosen at random.

Multi-day giveaways

In multi-day giveaways, you will give out prizes every day for a specific period (for example 12days of Christmas or 8 days of Hanukkah) which can bring you a lot of engagement on Facebook because people come back again and again to enter

  • A Product–a-Day Giveaway: line up awards for every day of your giveaway.
  • A Promotion-a-Day Giveaway: reveal a specific promotion code for a free shipping or discount that expires at the end of giveaway day.
  • A combination Giveaway: share digital prizes such as coupons, promo codes, and discounts, during your multi-day giveaway.

That’s it, guys.

You can run one of the contests above and share the result with us on comments.

The Secret to How Facebook Make Money from your Data

Facebook, Information, social media

With more than $1 billion per quarter in advertising revenue and 1.2 billion monthly active users, few realize that Facebook is more than just a social networking platform. It is a deceptively run corporation, worth more than $100 billion.

We should start by saying that you could assume that Facebook is not indeed a free service because users provide Facebook with data every day in exchange for the ability to use the site. In turn, Facebook can translate your likes, photos, locations, and other online activities into hard, cold cash.

Like, $40 billion in revenue in 2017, to be more specific. This how does it:

Ads, Ads, Ads

This is what the most of Facebook’s wealth comes from. This social network uses a lot of information; it knows about you to show you ads,  it believes you might like, and brands pay Facebook to display their products to the potential customers.

It’s called targeted ads, and it’s nearly the entire way that the company keeps the lights on; almost all of its $40 billion revenue comes particularly from targeted ads. Facebook doesn’t technically sell your data to strangers; it sells access to you based on your data.

Games and Other In-App Payments

In 2017, Facebook got $711 million off of different paid services, like purchases of desktop games offered in-app purchasing. This revenue stream has slowed down over the past several years.

“This decline is likely a reflection of the general shift away from desktop to mobile and mobile games,” Kristina Varshavskaya, a former Product Designer at Facebook.

Gift shop and virtual goods

Facebook currently makes a large amount of money from the Facebook Gift shop. Gift shop enables people to send virtual gifts to their friends. With $1 per gift, Facebook gifts have become a hugely profitable business, causing upwards of $100 million last year.

Facebook is opening up the gift shop to third-party developers to extend the quality of products traded through the shop.

Oculus Rift (maybe someday)

That $711 million value above included the sales of Oculus stocks and products, Facebook’s VR headset and additional gear. Although an expensive purchase at $2 billion back in 2014, Oculus hasn’t been a big supporter so far. With Oculus Go, a new, cheap version of the Oculus product now accessible, Mark Zuckerberg might get closer to his dream of combining VR into the Facebook user experience — using his products, of course.

Facebook watch (also someday)

The Proceeding to grow Facebook’s video experiment is something that the social network behemoth has its eye one.

Expecting to partner with content creators to showcase episodic series, long-form, Facebook Watch is a savvy strategy for keeping users on the site for longer, as well as a new possibility for advertisers, who can run advertisements and commercials during shows.

At an income call in April, Zuckerberg echoed the sentiments that Facebook Watch is an exciting and interesting venture, tempering this by saying it’s a little early to tell how well the Watch is doing.

“We are trying to make it a different experience from what you can get on YouTube… A bunch of the content that has come onto Watch is good and is working,” he said.